[Mb-civic] Money Flowed to Questionable Projects - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Money Flowed to Questionable Projects
State Leads in Army Corps Spending, but Millions Had Nothing to Do With 
Floods

By Michael Grunwald
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 8, 2005; Page A01

Before Hurricane Katrina breached a levee on the New Orleans Industrial 
Canal, the Army Corps of Engineers had already launched a $748 million 
construction project at that very location. But the project had nothing 
to do with flood control. The Corps was building a huge new lock for the 
canal, an effort to accommodate steadily increasing barge traffic.

Except that barge traffic on the canal has been steadily decreasing.

and other critics have complained about paltry funding for the Army 
Corps in general and Louisiana projects in particular. But over the five 
years of President Bush's administration, Louisiana has received far 
more money for Corps civil works projects than any other state, about 
$1.9 billion; California was a distant second with less than $1.4 
billion, even though its population is more than seven times as large.

Much of that Louisiana money was spent to try to keep low-lying New 
Orleans dry. But hundreds of millions of dollars have gone to unrelated 
water projects demanded by the state's congressional delegation and 
approved by the Corps, often after economic analyses that turned out to 
be inaccurate. Despite a series of independent investigations 
criticizing Army Corps construction projects as wasteful pork-barrel 
spending, Louisiana's representatives have kept bringing home the bacon.

For example, after a $194 million deepening project for the Port of 
Iberia flunked a Corps cost-benefit analysis, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) 
tucked language into an emergency Iraq spending bill ordering the agency 
to redo its calculations. The Corps also spends tens of millions of 
dollars a year dredging little-used waterways such as the Mississippi 
River Gulf Outlet, the Atchafalaya River and the Red River -- now known 
as the J. Bennett Johnston Waterway, in honor of the project's 
congressional godfather -- for barge traffic that is less than forecast.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/07/AR2005090702462.html
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